My Internet Press

Do you want to experiment with any of the following hosted software applications without buying domain names or spending money on web hosting?

1. Google Apps – with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and more.

2. WordPress.org – hosted version of WordPress where you can install plugins, download new themes and more.

3. MediaWiki – powerful wiki software that also powers Wikipedia

4. phpBB – software for running your own web forums.

If the answer is yes, Dreamhost just launched a new service that may interest you. It’s called Dreamhost Apps where you get free hosting for Google Apps, WordPress, Drupal and other popular hosted web software.

You can either use your own web domain or block a sub-domain like test.dreamhosters.com that will become the main address of your site. Dreamhost will manage all the databases and DNS entries – you’ll get an email as soon as the services are setup and ready for use.

Dreamhost Apps is absolutely free and you don’t need a PayPal account or credit card to sign-up so there’s no risk of getting charged later. Simply sign-up and then click on I value your friendship and let me in, pick the services that you want to install and done.

Dreamhost Apps is useful even you already have a domain or have signed up with some other web host – in that case you may use Dreamhost Apps as your playground to test stuff like Drupal, phpBB, MediaWiki or to check if your current themes and plugins are compatible with the latest release of WordPress.

Deamhost Apps is free only during the beta period but if you sign-up now, it will remain free for you forever. Also note that Dreamhost Apps doesn’t offer FTP or shell access so you will not be able to install custom PHP scripts or MySQL databases.

When Disqus first launched, I was a little critical because I like to maintain control of comments, give commenters the benefit of Dofollow links, and ultimately retain control of their user generated content.
I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.

Disqus gives blogger more stable and powerful commenting system. WordPress users can also install Disqus using their plugin.

These are some of the reasons why:

• Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
  It is an external javascript file, which Google can’t really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
  Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX.
• Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that “dofollow” isn’t for everyone because of the time commitment.
• Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won’t be universal or easy to implement
• Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that.
• Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn’t change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn’t change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can’t cope on its own.
• Social Media Viral Effect the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn’t trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
• Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don’t get to me (deliverability issues)

The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.
I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don’t stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.

I saw Blog.Co.In. I found that the user interface of Blog.Co.In just like Blogger or WordPress but since it’s powered by wordpress, we can call it as the Indian version of wordpress. While the dashboard is just like the wordpress itself, the major difference is that you can write your blog in English as well as Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali & Gujarati.

• It must be atleast 30 days old
• Should have a minimum of 100 posts published with at least 500 words in each post
• Should have at least 50 approved non-spam comments (Do not count Pingbacks and Trackbacks)
• Should have your original content (NO free articles / NO copy-paste from internet)
• Strictly follow their content policy
• Does not violate any copyrights.

This will come handy when you are trying to recover an accidentally deleted website or you need to retrieve a web page that no longer exists at the original location.

You opened a web page on the Internet but the server hosting the site returns a 404 error meaning that either the web page has been removed or moved to a different location.

To recover the lost page, the best option is that you search the page across all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Windows Live Search) and hope that a copy of the web page exists in the cache somewhere.

All major search engines store cached copies of web pages

If the original page is not available in any of the search engine’s cache, you can repeat the search process at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – it is the largest web repository holding a snapshot (or backup) of over 10 billion web pages.

The Internet Archive doesn’t store web pages created or modified in the past 6-12 months while search engines may have the most recent version of the web pages in their cache.

Recover Deleted Websites Automatically
While it is often possible to recover lost websites using a combination of search engine caches and web archives, the process can be very time-consuming especially if you are trying to recover a large site that had more than a few dozen web pages.

To ease the site recovery process, Frank McCown at Harding University created a tool called Warrick that lets you reconstruct any lost website (or single web page) automatically. Simply type the URL of the web site and Warrick will let you know via email once the recover process is over.

The tool is essentially a web crawler that scans and collects missing web pages from all the four web repositories – Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo. If a web page is found in more than one web repository, Warrick saves the page with the most recent date.

The recovery process may take some time for large websites. For instance, I tried Warrick for reconstructing Sizzling Technologyb and it took about a week to complete the job. The recovered web pages were provided as a zipped archive (~50 MB).

Warrick is available both as an online service or you can download the Perl source files and run them locally on your own computer.

If you have accidentally deleted or overwritten your web pages, make sure your run Warrick before Google and other search bots attempt to re-crawl the site and replace their cached copies with something else.

I recommend these softwares – WordPress (PHP), b2evolution (PHP/MySQL), Movable Type (Perl).

Free and open source software

These software packages are offered as free and open source software:

• Apache Roller (Java-based)
• b2evolution (PHP/MySQL)
• blosxom (Perl)
• Dotclear (PHP)
• DotNetNuke (VB.NET/ASP.NET)
• Drupal (PHP)
• Frog CMS (PHP)
• Elgg (PHP)
• Habari (PHP)
• HelixBlog (Ruby on Rails)
• Jaws (PHP)
• Joomla! (PHP)
• Livejournal (Perl) (Also available, developer hosted)
• LifeType (PHP)
• Movable Type (Perl)
• Nooto (Ruby on Rails)
• Nucleus CMS (PHP)
• PivotX (PHP)
• Serendipity (PHP)
• SimpleLog (Ruby on Rails)
• Slash (Perl)
• Subtext (C#/ASP.NET)
• Textpattern (PHP/MySQL)
• Thingamablog (Static web page, no need for CGI, PHP or MySQL)
• Typo (Ruby on Rails)
• WordPress (PHP)

* Open Source – Free Softwares